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Intuitions about sample size: the empirical law of large numbers
Author(s) -
Sedlmeier Peter,
Gigerenzer Gerd
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
journal of behavioral decision making
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.136
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1099-0771
pISSN - 0894-3257
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1099-0771(199703)10:1<33::aid-bdm244>3.0.co;2-6
Subject(s) - intuition , sample size determination , phenomenon , law of large numbers , sample (material) , psychology , econometrics , statistics , epistemology , mathematics , philosophy , random variable , cognitive science , chemistry , chromatography
According to Jacob Bernoulli, even the ‘stupidest man’ knows that the larger one's sample of observations, the more confidence one can have in being close to the truth about the phenomenon observed. Two‐and‐a‐half centuries later, psychologists empirically tested people's intuitions about sample size. One group of such studies found participants attentive to sample size; another found participants ignoring it. We suggest an explanation for a substantial part of these inconsistent findings. We propose the hypothesis that human intuition conforms to the ‘empirical law of large numbers’ and distinguish between two kinds of tasks–one that can be solved by this intuition (frequency distributions) and one for which it is not sufficient (sampling distributions). A review of the literature reveals that this distinction can explain a substantial part of the apparently inconsistent results. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.